Unmasking the Minister’s Wife

“Whom the gods wish to destroy they make into ministers’ wives” (162), L. M. Montgomery famously opined after marrying Presbyterian minister Ewen Macdonald in 1911. While serving congregations in the small towns of Leaskdale, Norval, and Zephyr, Ontario, until her husband’s retirement in 1935, Montgomery recorded her sentiments about being a minister’s wife in her private journals, hiding her true feelings from the public eye. When these sentiments were revealed posthumously in 1985 in the Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, many parishioners who were still living at the time were shocked to learn that her professional smile had masked deep resentment and anger.

Montgomery’s sentiments and the words she used to express them are threaded through Marianne Jones’ Maud and Me, a 2021 novel set in 1985 that explores the dual life of Nicole (Nikki) LeClair as an emerging professional painter and feminist, as well as a wife and mother. After her husband Adam, a science teacher, decides to retrain and become a minister in Marathon, a small mining town in Northwestern Ontario, Nicole turns to Montgomery’s journals for guidance. In this first-person narrative, Nicole’s increasing social and psychological isolation prompts her to dialogue with her imaginary friend—L. M. Montgomery, or Maud, who visits and stays for tea, even helping Nicole with household chores. Maud becomes her secret ally and refuge, offering advice about being a minister’s wife in a rural setting.

Structurally, the novel fuses two separate temporal narratives: Nicole’s 1980s, an era of low-budget household gadgets and rise of neoconservatism and anti-feminism; and Montgomery’s 1920s and 30s, marked by both economic boom and depression. Jones deftly braids these narratives by revealing the shared struggles the two women face as a result of their roles as minister’s wives and as imaginative creators. Readers of Montgomery’s diaries will recall her staging of multiple identities, with each entry constituting a performance of self on the page and a deep awareness of her social environment. So, when Nicole expresses grief about having to mask her feelings, it comes as no surprise that Maud advises her accordingly: “My dear, we all have our masks. . . . Our masks are what makes survival possible” (7). Nicole echoes this sentiment later in the novel when she states “[m]y professional smile was coming in handy more and more” (128); however, the smile also requires intense emotional labour that proves corrosive over time.

Both Maud and Nicole draw strengths from being creators, finding a creative counterpoint in nature by actively shaping a rural landscape aesthetic. Just as Montgomery celebrated the small-town beauty of Prince Edward Island in her most famous novels like Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Emily of New Moon (1923), so Maud and Me gives a deft literary voice to Northern Ontario’s sparsely populated world, endowing it with real and imaginary beauty. “I breathed in the scene,” Nicole observes. “It was a mild day, with a bright sun making snow diamonds on the bay. Birds’ footprints created hieroglyphic patterns in the snow close to the car. I took closeups of tree branches and distance shots of the hill swooping down to the lake’s surface” (96). Yet despite these imaginative evocations, the isolation of the north can be oppressive after months of monotony. Just as Maud sought connections with a cosmopolitan world, intermittently escaping to Toronto, so a birthday excursion to Toronto fills Nicole with the exhilaration of traffic noise, evoking the powerful sensory experience of immersing in the cultural life and the freedom of anonymity in the big city.

Despite such respite, Maud and Me is also a novel about depression, sorrow, and grief, mirroring the melancholy tenor of Montgomery’s journals. Just as Maud’s mental health came to suffer —her anxiety and depression increasing when her husband was diagnosed with religious melancholia (a fear of being condemned to an afterlife of hell)—so too Nicole sinks into depression. Compounding her feelings are accumulative losses and vulnerabilities including emotional distance from her mother, a wounded figure who retreats into emotional isolation; the loss of her closest friend, whose free  spirit who provided a counter balance to the oppressive social conformity of Marathon; and her realization that she is unable to help women like Heather, who escaped an abusive marriage, only to be lectured to by an overbearing church lady who insists that a wife should submit to her husband. As Nicole begins to confront her own father’s desertion, her situation once again mirrors Maud’s, who was similarly abandoned by her father as a child, but nevertheless idealized him. By the mid-90s when Nicole turns 39, she is forced to unmask and confront the truth, contrasting with Montgomery whose façade as the minister’s wife was not dropped until the contents of her private journal became known after her death. Nicole’s own tumultuous unmasking brings about conflict and consequential clashes even with Maud.

The novel is ultimately a tribute to the power of intertextuality, as L. M. Montgomery’s writings inspire new imaginative engagements and dialogues with an author a century later.  Likewise, twenty-first century readers are able to renew their own relationship with Montgomery’s work, as suggested by the title, Maud and Me. The transformative power of reading is underscored by the novel’s epigraph: “Nothing has been the same since Maud. She had caused me to question everything. Especially myself” (1). These creative dialogues will draw many Montgomery fans to this novel, allowing readers to draw parallels across time and space and thus speaking to Montgomery’s continued relevance in shaping Canadian literature. In turn, the novel functions as a fond tribute to the literary potential of northern Ontario, as the novel maps a new imaginative universe set between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie with Marathon in the centre, immersing readers in the poetic evocations of landscape and people.